Online retail as an industry vertical is transforming quickly to keep pace with the rising demands of the consumers looking for convenience. Customer service, which was one of the strong points of the brick-and-mortar stores in the past, is now eroding with the advancement in technologies such as live chat.

Believe it or not, live chat has the highest rated customer satisfaction as compared to phone, email, web forms, voice, and even social media (in some cases). Forrester Research recently stated that 44% of online consumers are of the opinion that a live person in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.

With live chat, customer support team becomes an invaluable resource for the company. It offers multiple advantages for the business to rise above the competition. It isn’t just surprising to note that live chat has proven its ability as a trusted tool.

Apart from improving customer satisfaction level, live chat can also lead to sales. So are you using a live chat tool for your website? If not, then it’s time you opt for this support platform. While many call it the ultimate sales hack, I would say that it’s definitely the easiest and most effective way to improve your website conversion in real-time.

Here some ways that using live chat can help your customers and make your business make more profit.

Be proactive: Are you making ample efforts to be available whenever your visitors need you? Are you one of those businesses that focus only on the working hours in their own time zone? To make your sales grow, a business needs to ensure that the live chat is available 24/7 because your customers will be too busy during working hours. They can only get in touch with you when they are free after that period of the day. If you don’t offer them the flexibility to contact you at their convenience, you may end up losing business.

Unlike traditional customer support, a company gets a chance to address both the concerns of prospects and existing clients during live chat. It’s key for improving sales since there is a direct method of improving conversion rates, which are elemental in achieving strengthening sales.

Focus on personalization: To improve sales,offer personalized advice based on each visitors’ past experience. Believe me, it works. Your support team using live chat should have an in-depth understanding of the product in order to give specific suggestions to the prospects.

On-time greetings: Yes, when you approach your client with a customized greeting it will help you improve sales. With a live chat tool, you will be able to set up customized greetings that will trigger automatically when a client faces some issues. Businesses that opted for automatic greetings have witnessed a jump in their sales.

Attractive chat windows: When you makechat window matches with the overall look and feel of the website, it will evoke trust in the potential customers. Make necessary amendments in your chat window that are in line with the website design and your customers won’t have to engage in the guessing game.

Identify the pain points: With a live chat tool, your customers will be able to instantly share their feedback (about your products, customer service, etc). They will know their voices are heard and also make them trust your company.

Train your support agents: I would recommend the formal training of the support executives so that it becomes easier for them to resolve/answer the client queries. Training goes a long way to ensure that you are efficient, focused, and keen to satisfy the customers.

These are the benefits of using live chat for a business:

Opens upsell opportunities:One of the biggest profit-booster for every business is the upselling opportunities. There’s a lot to gain after the client inquiries are resolved.

For instance, the smart sales executive can inform the client about an ongoing sale or a discount coupon. This ensures that the customers don’t have to go offsite to find out a coupon code.

Reduce cart abandonment: When a client or a prospect has ample information about a product or service, live chat can reduce the gap between “Place Order” and abandoning the cart.

In conclusion, a live chat software offers innumerable advantages in terms of sales improvement. It has proven its ability to boost conversions, sales, and making customer support more productive.

Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various Knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling..